Pomona's Travels

Pomona, the gloriously impractical servant girl who scandalized Rudder Grange, finally gets her chance to see the world. When Jone and her husband embark on a grand tour of England and Scotland, Pomona tags along, and chaos predictably follows. She tangles with wild pigs in the English countryside, negotiates the absurdities of British hotel society, and somehow finds herself at a duchess's table and a royal knighting ceremony. Through it all, Pomona remains magnificently herself: earnest, unconventional, and perpetually bewildered by the pretensions of the upper classes she encounters. The novel is both a delightful travelogue of Victorian Britain and a sharp comedy of manners, with Pomona's plain-speaking American sensibilities serving as a wry commentary on British social conventions. Stockton gives his beloved heroine room to flourish beyond the domestic sphere, and the results are as funny as anything in the earlier book. For readers who fell in love with Pomona's misadventures in Rudder Grange, this sequel offers more of her incomparable naivety, her two unlikely romantic prospects, and her unshakeable conviction that the world operates according to rules that only she understands.